Do You Work in a Power Outage Hot Spot?
Hot spots for power outages are more severe than previously known, according to research from Texas A&M's Urban Resilience Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab.
In a study of the last 10 years of power outage data in the United States, the researchers identified a 20 percent increase in the rate of outages in both frequency and duration after 2019.
The researchers used an AI model, which evaluated around 179 million power outage records at 15-minute intervals across more than 96 percent of the United States. Researchers then fed that data into a power system vulnerability assessment framework based on outage intensity, frequency, and duration to build a Power System Vulnerability Index (PSVI) for each U.S. county.
Ali Mostafavi, PhD, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Texas A&M and a member of the research team, told Texas Standard that the spike in 2019 was due to the increased frequency of storms and extreme weather events, including cold snaps, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Mostafavi explained that when the increased frequency of these events meets an aging power grid, they create more frequent and longer outages.
The survey was originally published in June 2025 and noted that “power outages also result from various incidents, such as electrical component failures, supply shortages, physical attacks, vandalism, cyberattacks, and wildlife interference,” the researchers wrote. “The increasingly frequent, intense, and prolonged power outages are disrupting transportation, communications, water supply, and healthcare systems, thus seriously undermining public well-being. As a result, effectively evaluating and addressing vulnerability of power systems in communities has become an urgent priority.”
The researchers identified 318 counties across 45 U.S. states as hot spots for high power system vulnerability. Those include counties in the East and West Coasts and Gulf regions, as well as the Chicago-Detroit metropolitan areas around the Great Lakes, indicating that areas of dense development face higher power outage vulnerability.
Many data centers are located in these hot spots, which demonstrates the need for increased infrastructure investment to ensure resilience, the researchers found.
When the power goes out, everything stops.
— Texas A&M University (@TAMU) August 21, 2025
Texas A&M researchers have built the nation’s first Power System Vulnerability Index — helping leaders predict where outages will hit hardest and act before disaster strikes.
It’s not just about lights. It’s about lives, safety & a… pic.twitter.com/719NmEsn2I
The PSVI map the researchers created is free to use and it rates counties on a five-level scale of minor to extreme.
“This is an interactive tool that can showcase the overall PSVI ratings and scores of individual U.S. counties over the past decade, and how vulnerability shifts year by year,” said Junwei Ma, PhD, a researcher for the project, in a press release.
Looking at the area around Washington, D.C., for example, the 10-year summary view shows that D.C. itself has a “severe” vulnerability rating for power outages while Arlington and Alexandria in northern Virginia are moderately vulnerable. The county of Baltimore, Maryland, however, is rated as severely vulnerable. But considering just 2023 data, all three areas are rated “moderate” or “minor.”
The map can be used to make risk management decisions about resilience and business continuity amid growing outage rates and severity.
“The fact that in the past 10 years we have seen around 8 billion customer hours of outage just put that in perspective,” Mostafavi said. “That will translate to many, many hours per individual customer across the United States.
“The alarming part is that the amount of investment needed to improve the resilience of the grid is significantly high, and the procedures for implementing these resiliency measures are slow,” he continued. “So if we don’t implement these resiliency measures in the near future, it will be a catch-up game. And the cost of repair becomes so much that we’ll not leave enough funds for resilience investment to mitigate the future impact.”
